Bitrix24 Blogs

As you may have noticed, you are now able to purchase telephony credits from inside your Bitrix24 account or at http://www.bitrix24.com/prices/tariffs.php. The tariffs page also has telephone call rates that are available to you, depending on which country you are in and what type of call you are making.

If you go to Settings –> Telephony Settings you will also be able to specify a relay number. That’s a phone number that people you call to will see. We highly recommend you add the number that you want your customers to call back at.

While you can use web phone calls from Bitrix24 to talk to your co-workers, this feature is mostly used in Bitrix24 CRM. All calls made from the CRM are automatically registered and added to CRM activity list. However, you can also record the actual phone call made from the CRM either for quality assurance purposes or so that before you make your next phone call, you can quickly refresh your memory about the last one.

Please note that in some countries and states you have to notify a person about the fact that a phone call is being recorded. Make sure you follow your local laws and regulations.

We at Bitrix24 love startups. After all, even though Bitrix was founded way back in 1998, we treat Bitrix24 as our own internal startup. Brandon Bouck, the Founder and CEO of LearnJack.com was kind enough to tell us how Bitrix24 helped him build his startup. Here's the story of LearnJack:

Nearly a year ago I was attending networking groups searching for the most fantastic team who could take an idea I had and build it into creation. I soon found a partner from a business relationship who helped Learnjack source it's engineering team. I was divinely blessed to find the right team, a team of high regard, and begin building Learnjack.com from scratch in an almost non-existent niche industry. We found a group of web engineers in Budapest Hungary though another Hungarian contact of my partner. We sold a team of six high level web engineers on the idea and who agreed to build the product and see it through to completion for an equity stake. Because our team was spread from the US, England, and Hungary we were faced with the task of communicating, keeping organized, maintaining a team, and quite frankly getting to know each other. As an executive team we needed a tool that would allow us to continually motivate a team of 8 - 10 people on a weekly basis so that we could create a very challenging website.

Part I. We've asked several Enterprise 2.0 and social intranet experts what they expect from 2014. Is there 'social enterprise' bubble or not? Will this year become the year of big breakthrough and wide adoption? Do you expect any surprises from the industry in 2014? Here are the replies that we got:

2014 is when 'social' (in the enterprise) will shift: less of a set of design metaphors for work tech, and instead a set of principles related to our scientific understanding of sociality. Social will form one thread in the expanding discourse around new ways of work, but not necessarily the hottest one. Work tech vendors have had their hands on sociality for over five years, and they haven't done much with it, honestly. Innovation among the most well-established companies actually seems to be slowing. It's become a war of attrition. There's more exciting work at the fringes, with some interesting chat-based solutions, and the increasing interest in small-and-simple task-centric and performance-centric tools. The combination of innovative business practices -- like holocracy, Results-Only-Work-Environments, and leanership -- with narrow-and-deep cooperative tools will begin to shift the conversation in a different and perhaps more productive direction.

We are planning a few changes to our main page and adding client testimonials and case studies is one of them. If Bitrix24 has absolutely changed the way you run your business, saved you thousands of dollars, helped your sales explode or performed any other technomiracle, we sure would like to hear your story. Please send your testimonials and case studies to DID at Bitrix24 dot CO M, with CASE STUDY as subject. Please, include your name, title, photograph and URL of your organizations. We will feature most interesting testimonials and case studies on our website, blog and in social media.

We've asked several Enterprise 2.0 and social intranet experts what they expect from 2014. Is there 'social enterprise' bubble or not? Will this year become the year of big breakthrough and wide adoption? Do you expect any surprises from the industry in 2014? Here are the replies that we got:

In May of 2013 Bitrix24 added audio and video calls between users of the Bitrix24 Intranet, providing them with a convenient means of communicating with colleagues without using add-ons, additional downloads or plug-ins, etc.

Thanks to VoxImplant (by Zingaya, Inc.), at the end of 2013 Bitrix24's cloud service was extended with a new feature - IP-telephony to mobile phones and land lines. This feature supports convenient direct dialing from CRM contact and lead lists, and recording of the conversations, as well as a regular dialpad accessible from the Bitrix24 messenger.

We will look more closely at the use of IP telephony, costs, its future development and the technical details and service requirements.

We have added three new features that have been frequently requested. First, if you are using our free plan, you can now buy 12 extra users for $25/mo. A lot of you complained that paying $99 or $199 each month so that one or two additional users can work in Bitrix24 made no sense. So now you can have up to 24 users in your account, without having to switch to Bitrix24 Standard or Bitrix24 Professional.

Here are the important things to keep in mind – you can add 12 extra users only once. If you need to have more than 24 users, you will need to upgrade to the Standard or Professional plan. Second, buying extra users does not give you access to features available in our premium plans and it does not qualify you for priority support.

Likewise you can now buy extra disk space if you have exceeded or are getting close to the limits permitted by your current plan, including free one. Extra disk space is sold in packages of 25GB, 250GB and 1TB for $25/mo, $50/mo and $100/mo respectively. As with buying extra users, if you use our free plan and decide to buy additional disk space, this will not unlock premium features, nor qualify you for priority support.

Finally, the new version of Bitrix24.Drive now works with group files, in addition to personal files. Now you can also share folders inside your personal files and specify which Bitrix24 users are allowed access to them. Synchronization with company files via Bitrix24.Drive will be added soon.

Bitrix24’s cloud service now has a great new tool to track time spent on tasks. You can estimate how much time should be spent on a task and after its completion, compare that to how much time has actually been spent.

Yesterday we've reached an important milestone – 100,000th company have signed up for Bitrix24, making us the fastest growing enterprise social company that has reached both 1000,000 users and 100,000 company signups. Eat your heart out, Yammer.

Sometimes you only have access to e-mail but you want to post something to the Activity stream via e-mail or share someone’s e-mail message with everyone. Or you may want to automatically feed all incoming e-mails sent to a specific address (sales@yourdomain.com or helpdesk@yourcompany.com) into a specific Bitrix24 workgroup (Sales Leads or HelpDesk in this example). Bitrix24 Send&Save technology lets you do that, if you use the self-hosted version of our software (for the cloud version Send&Save works in the CRM).

As you may or may not know, Salesforce has decided to shut down their Do.com service. We may be a little bit biased, but we think that Bitrix24 is the best Do.Com alternative currently available on the market and it’s 100% free if your team has 12 members or less. To learn more about tasks and project management or CRM and Contact Management in Bitrix24, visit our features section.

Salesforce has promised to release a Do.com export tool on November 15. Our programmers will evaluate it in order to create Do.Com to Bitrix24 migration app as soon as technical specifications and data format details become available. You can subscribe to our Twitter or Facebook account, if you’d like to be notified when it becomes available as well as to get special discount coupons.